What Time Devours (45 page)

He spun around, but the two men who had been with him had melted into the pine forest at his back and completely disappeared.

As a pair of the paramedics—or whatever the Brits called them—were ministering to Elsbeth, and others were walking down the Ridgeway toward Wayland’s Smithy, Thomas stopped the policeman who was escorting them.

“One of the men killed back there was Professor Randall

Dagenhart,” he said. “He has a laptop computer. It may be in his car, or back at the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford. It’s important that you get hold of it before anyone hears he’s dead. In the interest of closure. When you have it, I’d like to talk you through what it contains, and make you a proposition.”

The policeman fumbled for his notebook.

“And you’ll want to talk to Daniella Blackstone’s steward,” said Thomas. “I think you’ll find he’s been blackmailing Dagenhart, trying to get him to reveal the whereabouts of a certain play.”

“A play?”

“Yes,” said Thomas. “It doesn’t matter now. It’s gone.”

“And he was blackmailing Dagenhart about Daniella Blackstone’s death?”

“No,” said Thomas. “About something that happened before that. A long time ago.”

He began walking along the dark path toward White Horse Hill, and he thought of the way all those lives had tied together, the academics and the students, the living and the dead, all somehow melded by contact, by shared history, and the words of that Paul Simon song floated back up into his mind. Something about taking two bodies and twirling them into one . . .

Very true
, he thought.
Very Shakespearean
.

PART V

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

—Shakespeare, “Sonnet 116”

EPILOGUE

It was hot in Chicago. Even down here by the lake it felt muggy and oppressive. The traffic was backed up all along Lakeshore Drive, and with the Cubs making a bona fide bid for the NL Central Division title, it would get worse as game time approached.

Thomas wasn’t sure why Polinski had suggested they meet here, where they had last seen each other. There would, perhaps, have been neater closure—what Mr. Barnabus would have called
Shakespearean
closure—in ending it where it had begun, at his own house, but Thomas had his doubts about how much real closure Shakespeare’s plays ever truly had, so he preferred it this way. Over the last few days he had thought a good deal about what had happened, how he had gotten pulled into it all, and what—if anything—he had achieved, and he found that much of it came back to Escolme.

The play, which had been lost, was still lost, and the one copy that they knew had existed was gone. Blackstone was dead, as were Escolme, Gresham, Dagenhart, and Taylor Bradley.

A body count worthy of Hamlet
.

Were any of those his fault? None directly, he thought, except Bradley, and who knew, maybe it would have been worse if he hadn’t gotten involved. And he had uncovered things—truths of a sort—that were valuable, even if they couldn’t resurrect the dead or restore a lost play by Shakespeare, and wasn’t that the core of his job as a teacher: finding truth, passing it on, or encouraging others to seek it out for themselves?

It was easy to forget that, probably worse in academia, he thought, with all the fuss about publication and tenure, and Thomas found himself reluctantly sympathizing with Taylor Bradley’s skepticism about what he had to do to maintain his position. Taylor had been passionate and excited about Shakespeare, but it hadn’t been enough, hadn’t even been right. Perhaps if he had taught high school or worked at a theater, and his place had been filled by someone writing about the gender and class dynamics of the Renaissance as happened to be manifested by a few plays by someone called Shakespeare, maybe no one would have died.

Thomas also sympathized with Taylor’s outrage at the burning of the play, an act of cultural vandalism that no amount of personal hardship on Dagenhart’s part could justify. In the last few days Thomas had been playing XTC obsessively, buying up all their albums and downloading video clips from the Internet. There he had stumbled on their song “Burning Books,” which deftly slid between the torching of text to the torching of the people who wrote or read them. Though Dagenhart had never meant to kill the girls or even Taylor, his fanaticism had burned as hotly and as dangerously as any religious or political ideologue’s.

Words, words, words. Mightier indeed than the sword and at least as lethal, though Thomas thought that Andy Partridge’s assessment of the printed word as more than sacred was the only useful way to think of them. Burning books—whatever the motive—could only ever be the act of a barbarian or a dictator.

That morning he had called Deborah Miller in Atlanta to thank her for her help and to play her the song, but she was still in Mexico and Tonya had no idea when she would return. He thought he heard some concern in her voice under the playful remarks about Deborah sunning herself on some Cancún beach while Tonya kept the museum on its feet.

“Running up and down some Mayan pyramid, more like,” he muttered aloud, watching the soft lapping of the water on the lakeshore.

“Talking to yourself now, Knight?”

He hadn’t seen Polinski approach.

“Hey,” he said.

“Rehearsing your next interview?” she said, her wide mouth buckled into a smirk. “I can’t turn on the TV without seeing you these days.”

“Awful, isn’t it?” he said, meaning it.

She was wearing a pantsuit with a light gray jacket that bulged where her gun was, and she looked hot and flustered. “But you helped clear Escolme’s name, showed he was telling the truth. All that crazy stuff about the Shakespeare play. No wonder you’re famous.”

“I guess so.” Thomas nodded.

“And from what I’ve heard, the search isn’t over, right?”

“It is for me,” said Thomas, “but the news that one copy of the play survived has spawned a lot of searches for others. People are badgering Elsbeth Church for what she remembers of it, but I doubt she’ll tell them anything. It’s going to be quite the cottage industry on the fringes of academia for a while.”

“And you think they’ll find it?”

“Who knows. There may be one out there somewhere, in some uncataloged archive or forgotten loft storage . . . Who knows?”

He and Polinski had talked several times daily since that night on the Ridgeway, often in conference with representatives of the English and French police, as coordinated by Interpol. Together they had helped put all the pieces together. Bradley’s face had been identified on CCTV at the Demier cellars, and his booking confirmed at the Drake during the National Shakespeare Conference. Most of the evidence was circumstantial, but it was enough to build the case against him, and forensics would fill in some holes. Elsbeth Church—who would make a full recovery—had told the Newbury police that she had invited Thomas into her house, and though they knew this was a lie, they had been content to drop the charges against him. The case was effectively closed. Thomas didn’t know what they still had to talk about, but Polinski had been insistent that they meet face to face on his return to the States.

“It mattered to Escolme that he was proved right,” said Polinski.

“You know that for sure?”

“I do, actually,” she said, taking an envelope out of her breast pocket. “Escolme didn’t have much, but he suspected he was in danger and made provisions. The day he wrote to you, he also wrote to a lawyer with what amounts to his last will and testament.”

Thomas stared at her, wondering where this was going.

“In the grand scheme of things,” she said, “it doesn’t amount to much—a few thousand dollars’ worth of assets—and there was a condition attached. He had no family and no close friends. His estate, such as it was, was to go to you, if you were able to prove that his story about the play was true and that he had not killed Daniella Blackstone. You did, so it’s yours.”

Thomas stared at her. They were standing only yards from where Escolme’s body had been found.

“There’s another catch,” she said, and she was frowning now as she checked the wording of the letter. “The money should be used by Mr. Thomas Knight to fund his exploration of future cases, which he should pursue in the manner of a consulting detective.”

She gave him an ironic look.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said.

“I kind of wish I were,” said Polinski, “because I know you are the kind of guy who will take this request-from-the-grave stuff seriously.”

In his mind Thomas heard Escolme’s bad British accent over the phone: “
You see but you do not observe
! Great stuff.”

He supposed it was.

“A consulting detective?” he said.

“Forget it,” said Polinski. “The last thing I need on my beat is some clown who thinks he’s Sherlock Holmes.”

“You think I’m a clown?”

“I think you’re a high school teacher,” she said, smiling.

“I am,” he said, returning her smile.“And proud to be one.

But,” he added with an uncharacteristic wink, “I get the summers off.”

Thomas turned the campus map around till he had himself oriented and made a beeline for a string of three-story brown-stones shaded by maples. It was dry and the trees were starting to droop and yellow before their time. The English department had seen better days, and its once luxuriant marble floors were cracked and stained. The stairs to the third floor were tight and rickety, and the tiled hallway at the top rose and fell in great, sagging waves.

Julia McBride was sitting at her desk, pen in hand, leafing through a stack of brownish books each tagged with a library call number. She didn’t look up at his knock, but told him to come in before she realized who he was.

The play of emotions on her face was quick and complicated. Thomas thought he saw surprise, even concern, then restraint, and finally a familiar flirtatious attention.

“Tom Knight,” she said, beaming. “Well, I’ll be damned! But then you knew that already. To what do I owe this visitation? I rarely have celebrities dropping by, except academics, and we all know
they
don’t count.”

“I just wanted to tie up a few loose ends,” said Thomas, smiling and watchful.

“For whom?”

“Mainly for myself.”

“Indeed?” she said, shifting and settling in her chair as if still unsure of what tone to strike. “Aren’t you the bloodhound? I was sorry to hear about old Randy Dagenhart. Very sad. And that young man,
Bradley
, yes?”

She said it as if she had to reach for the name and Thomas felt his knuckles tighten on the chair arm.

“Taylor Bradley,” said Thomas. “Come now, Julia. You knew him as well as everyone else did.”

She swallowed and adjusted.

“You’re right, of course,” she said. “Funny, isn’t it? Some people want to suggest they knew him better than they did, and some—like me—want to get away from him.”

“That is funny,” said Thomas.

“Human nature, I guess,” she said.

“Yes?”

“What?”

“I didn’t think you believed in human nature,” said Thomas. “I thought everything was temporally and culturally specific. I thought that ‘human nature’ was just one of those catchalls that white men used to claim that their values were universal.”

She considered him shrewdly.

“Is there something you’re getting at?” she said.

“Not at all,” said Thomas, smiling. “What would make you think that, dearest chuck?”

She stared at him.

“What?”

“
Dearest chuck
, I said,” Thomas repeated, his smile smaller now, more careful. “That was what Bradley called you back in Stratford. It struck me at the time because it seemed friendlier—more intimate—than your relationship deserved, considering he was the lowly assistant professor at the no-name school and you were the big-name scholar. But then there was the fact that he knew what that obscure cocktail of yours was, though I’m pretty sure the recipe came from the Drake. So you’d spent a little more time together than you suggested. Still . . .
dearest chuck
?”

“He was joking,” she said. “And drunk. Trying out his Britishisms.”

“Yes, I thought that too,” said Thomas. “But it turns out that
chuck
isn’t a common Britishism in the South at all. More a northern thing, apparently. Liverpool and places like that. Taylor Bradley hadn’t been anywhere north of Stratford.”

“Maybe he got it off the TV,” she said. She shifted in her chair. “Are you going somewhere with this?”

“The thing is,” said Thomas, ignoring her impatience, “it wasn’t so much the phrase as your response to it that stuck in my mind. You looked—I don’t know—irritated, but more than that. Alarmed.”

“Why on earth would I be alarmed?” she said. Her face was white.

“That’s what I kept wondering,” said Thomas. “And then I remembered where I knew the phrase from. ‘Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck, till thou applaud the deed.’ ”

There was a long silence. Thomas counted the seconds. Three. Four. Five.

“So?”

“So, that was what Macbeth says to Lady Macbeth after he has sent killers after Banquo and his son.”

She stared at him. Another three seconds passed and then, her voice level and clear, she said, “I think it’s time you left, don’t you?”